What is the point of GM's notes?

[pemerton]

I told you personally, no less than three times, that I am very constrained by what the players do and their input is critical to what I narrate in response.

All you said about their input is that they declare actions for their PCs. When I asked if you consider player intent as a factor in narration of consequences you didn't answer. Do you consider player intent as a factor in the narration of consequences?

#5 is what those on my side of things have been describing for dozens and dozens of pages.

The only constraints you have pointed to is the player's action declaration.

@Bedrockgames in another thread earlier this year expressly said that he would not establish fiction having regard to a player's desire that his/her PC find their long lost brother, and thus would allow for the possibility that a significant amount of play time might be spent on this only for the player to discover what was already predetermined from the start by Bedrockgames, ie that the brother has been dead all along.

Other than the actual action declaration (eg I ask the barkeep if they've seen my brother) in what way to you narrate fiction constrained by the players's play of their PCs?

 

[pemerton]

But you could create a working model of Middle Earth and explore that, based on all the information JRR Tolkien has given us. These set parameters. Places exist on the map in particular locations. Towns are described with characteristics. etc. To say all you are discovering if you run an emulation of that world in an RPG, is what JRR Tolkien invented, I think misses something essential that is going on. There is a big difference between reading a passage in Lord of the Rings, looking at a map of Middle Earth, and traveling in a game with a GM and system emulating that world to explore those places. You are not simply discovering what JRR Tolkien invented, because things will be encountered that he never thought of (they may be extrapolations but they are new).

The extrapolation is not an output of a model. It is someone engaging in a creative act.

Mathematics, like other sciences, is characterised by non-collusive convergence.

Literary creation is not. That's part of what is important about artistic endeavour!

You aren't just learning what the GM has prepped, because the players will make decisions that result in things emerging the GM never thought of, and the dice too will cause unexpected things to emerge.

So who thinks of the new things? If the GM doesn't think of them, and the players don't get to just make them up, where do they come from?

 

[Bedrockgames]

The extrapolation is not an output of a model. It is someone engaging in a creative act.

Mathematics, like other sciences, is characterised by non-collusive convergence.

Literary creation is not. That's part of what is important about artistic endeavour!

I never said it was mathematics. It is a model in the sense that I have an image of the place in my head. Ideas can be models. We use models all the time to simplify and understand processes going on in the world, or to explain them (sometimes with math and science, sometimes without math and science). The extrapolation is the living world part and the necessary expansion of that model as unexpected things come up (but those expansions contribute to the model). The point is one can set objective parameters for the model and these can be explored. It doesn't matter if the model literally exists, it functionally does exist. When the players explore the house, if I have laid it out in my head in advance, what choices the players make at each step of exploration matters. If I haven't, their choices are meaningless because I am just deciding what shows up at every turn. It isn't literary creation. It is mental modeling. The problem with your end of this is you keep bending this toward literary descriptions (which I think tilts everything towards stuff like being 'the fiction' and thinking in terms not as much about 'the world'). Again no one is saying the model literally exists, they are saying it is a model, that the GM can imagine, and this can be significantly aided by notes, maps, etc. And when you add the concept of a living world onto that model, it becomes something quite interesting.

If you are going to use terms like the bolded, you will need to define them simply and clearly. I feel like I am speaking very plain english when I use a term like modeling and you are bringing in very precise, specialized language, and using that to undermine what I am saying. I think most people understand what I mean by mental model. I don't care if you have an advanced degree and work at a university Pemerton.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So who thinks of the new things? If the GM doesn't think of them, and the players don't get to just make them up, where do they come from?

The interaction of the players and the GM. This is why I say you are greatly oversimplifying and being reductive. The GM isn't just coming up with stuff in a vacuum. If the players go into a city and say they want to find a mutton stew restaurant, the GM didn't think of that, until the players suggested that's where their characters were trying to go. Now the GM has final say over whether such a place would exist in the city, but the players are having some kind of input. The only limitation on my side, is they don't have GM power to call it into existence and there isn't a mechanical process for the GM making his or her decision. But the GM can always choose to fall back on a mechanical process if desired

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Bedrockgames in another thread earlier this year expressly said that he would not establish fiction having regard to a player's desire that his/her PC find their long lost brother, and thus would allow for the possibility that a significant amount of play time might be spent on this only for the player to discover what was already predetermined from the start by Bedrockgames, ie that the brother has been dead all along.

This is just how I would do it. Different GMs can do this differently and it is pretty clear to me that @Maxperson and I have slightly different styles. But that doesn't mean there aren't constraints on me as a GM. I spoke about some of the constraints I have and some of the ways that player choices (and even expectations) can and do feed in the decisions I make. Also this is one type of instance (i.e. what is going on with a PCs brother). Not all decisions are going to be like that. Many will be a lot more constrained by mechanics, and by the physical limitations of the setting: i.e. if the brother is alive and in a distant city, I can't have him suddenly show up to save the day if he would need to travel 8 days just to get there).

 

[Bedrockgames]

I personally find it impossible to talk about where the fiction comes from without talking about who creates it. And the most straightforward word in English to describe the creation of fiction is authorship.

I frequently co-author work. This involves a lot of interaction and conversation. That doesn't mean that the work is spontaneously generating itself, though. It is being authored.

But this just shows how you control the conversation by controlling the language. I've long rejected the term 'the fiction' here and I think with good reason. Authoring only makes sense because you are choosing to use 'the fiction' as the product. If we used something that didn't suggest books or literature, authoring suddenly makes less sense. I don't typically describe someone as the author of a song, or the author a painting or map. You can use the term author, but we usually draw distinctions. And I think GMing is distinct enough that authoring sounds really strange as a description of what they are doing.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I frequently co-author work. This involves a lot of interaction and conversation. That doesn't mean that the work is spontaneously generating itself, though. It is being authored.

Yes, but these are very different mediums. In some senses it is spontaneous (the way the outcome of a jam session is spontaneous). Part of the problem here is RPGs are their own medium, and the analysis often gets shaped by the other mediums we bring in as examples to understand what is going on.

Like I said before, the issue here is this isn't simply an author staring at a blank page and filling it, and it isn't being delivered to a passive audience. The players are reacting in real time to anything the GM says or decides. There is a system that constrains the GM (some systems place fewer constraints, but most have constraints of some kind---in lots of games I can't just decide your sword swing hits the orc and kills it for example, and in many I am expected to allow you to use skills or other abilities, or call on some kind of roll to interpret the physics of something like climbing up a wall in dangerous conditions). So there are the mechanics. Often the mechanics have dice, which throw in a whole random element. And then the GM has the audience reacting in real time. That does constrain what you can do. You can't just announce in the middle of a Forgotten Realms game that a starship descends from the clouds and ET walks out of its hatch. I mean you can try that, but you will be met by blank stares and you might even prompt cries of of WTF. When an author writes a book, they can anticipate that kind of reaction but they don't have the readers there in the room with them when the decision is made. Even today writers of television shows don't have real time reactions from audiences, there is still a delay. But you can see the change and constraints it places on them, the more that distance between creating something and the audience responding is shortened. Further the players actual choices constrain the GM. If you are just zooming in on individual instances of the GM making decisions, this will be lost. But if the players walked to the town of Donyra, that confines what the GM can say is going on. If Donyrya is a landlocked, desert oasis, he can't just announce that the dread Pirate Zabaea and her fleet arrive on the shores and ransack the town. If the players killed Zabaea earlier in the campaign, the GM can't just say "Zabaea approaches you along the road from the distance" (unless she was resurrected or returning as some form of undead: and both of those things are going to be constrained by the setting, the system, etc).

 

[Manbearcat]

But this just shows how you control the conversation by controlling the language. I've long rejected the term 'the fiction' here and I think with good reason. Authoring only makes sense because you are choosing to use 'the fiction' as the product. If we used something that didn't suggest books or literature, authoring suddenly makes less sense. I don't typically describe someone as the author of a song, or the author a painting or map. You can use the term author, but we usually draw distinctions. And I think GMing is distinct enough that authoring sounds really strange as a description of what they are doing.

If you subbed “content” for “fiction”, you have “the content.”

Now you sub “content generator” for “author.” You lose economy of word as you have to chew on 3 more syllables every time you voice/write it, but it works well enough for generically capturing “writer of song” and/or “painter of portrait” (which, for the record, I don’t understand why “author” - or “fiction” are problems especially given that Oxford English is good with it; “be the originator of-create” and “imagined events/invention”).

As above, I don’t understand the language issue, but, for a moment putting on the “this language is a problem” hat, would “content generator” and “the content” put this to bed?

 

[pemerton]

But this just shows how you control the conversation by controlling the language. I've long rejected the term 'the fiction' here and I think with good reason. Authoring only makes sense because you are choosing to use 'the fiction' as the product. If we used something that didn't suggest books or literature, authoring suddenly makes less sense. I don't typically describe someone as the author of a song, or the author a painting or map. You can use the term author, but we usually draw distinctions. And I think GMing is distinct enough that authoring sounds really strange as a description of what they are doing.

Why's it matter? What's at stake? Call them the composer instead! The point is that there is imagined stuff (what I call fiction), and it's in the GM's head (at least that's how you've described a sandbox). Who put it there? And then it gets into the players' heads. How does that transmission take place?

The terminology is not very important. What matters, in playing a RPG, is the actual process.

How did the players in my Classic Traveller game learn that, in the complex their PCs were exploring, there was a nearly 100 metre deep shaft with a great pendulum swinging in it? Because I told them. How did I know? Because I read it in the module.

How do the players in your game learn about the setting that you as GM have created?

 

[TheSword]

@pemerton at the end of 1698 posts, do you have a hypothesis or is it just lots of questions and quibbling over details and language? You asked lots of questions about the purpose of GM notes at the start but do you actually have a conclusion?